This year, many are marking 250 years since our Declaration of Independence.

But even before that, the greater Boston area played a critical role in the country's founding.

Judy Woodruff explores some of that long ago history, as well as some more recent turmoil,

to ask what it tells us about the country today.

It's for her series, America at a crossroads.

The British ships in the harbor around Charlestown are firing their cannons.

Coming from over there.

Coming from over there.

High above Boston's Charlestown neighborhood, a 221-foot obelisk marks the first major battle of the American Revolution,

and one of its bloodiest, waged between the British troops then occupying the city and

intent on taking this position from the colonial militia men who had dug in to protect it.

Towards the end, it was hand-to-hand fighting in the fort and just brutal stuff.

Bloody.

Bloody. The British were very angry that, you know, they had gone through all of this to get there,

and it was an ugly, bloody, bloody scene.

Though fought on Breeds Hill, it became known as the Battle of Bunker Hill and marked an undeniable escalation

in this conflict more than a year before the Declaration of Independence.

And even though the British won, the message was the Americans can hold their own.

Right.

This was established the pattern of the war, that the British will win on the battlefield, but the Americans

are still left to fight.

Nathaniel Philbrick is the author of many books about American history, including his 2013

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